by Jeff Jackson
* * *
Shaun smooths his long hair and places his mouth next to the door. He turns on his charm, speaking in the calm and coaxing tone of an old friend whispering confidences into the boy’s ear.
—Hey, man, he says, everything’s cool. We’d like to see you for a minute. We just want to talk.
—Maybe you can help us, Flo adds, in a voice that has an unexpected authoritative purr. We’ve got a question about our friend.
Behind them, Edie has removed her oversize glasses and paces in a tight circle. She traces the same conflicted steps, clockwise, then counter. Her fingers worry holes in her cardigan sweater, poking through the loose weave of the wool, widening the fissures until they resemble exit wounds.
Finally, she stops and confronts the door. She thumps her skinny fists against it and emits a series of wordless shrieks. She acts possessed, her face a mask of pure ferocity. A wild scarlet pucker.
—Open up, motherfucker! she shouts.
* * *
Somewhere inside the house the boy switches on a lamp, brightening the glass door and throwing a rectangle of light onto the front porch.
* * *
They stand back and stare at the pale light. White moths fly frantic circles around the illuminated door. No shadows darken the frame. No voice from within replies. Shaun kicks at the walkway, dislodging several loose bricks. Edie applies a fresh coat of lipstick and hands the tube to Flo. Their mouths are bright emerald smears. They shine like iridescent battle scars. As they stand together in the taunting glow, Shaun has a better appreciation of why Xenie liked them. Down the street a dog starts to yowl, joined by others in succession, protesting against an unseen moon.
You were always drawn to people like you.
Savagery hidden in their hearts.
Shaun uproots a brick from the walkway. A surge of adrenaline courses through his cells, and he’s surprised how much he craves this violence. He balances the brick in his palm. It’s lighter than he imagined.
The air feels electric, and the girls’ expressions alternate like a current between excitement and alarm. Flo suddenly pales and her puckered mouth begins to twitch.
—You’re absolutely sure it’s him? she whispers.
Shaun’s face is clenched. His eyes are numb. His voice is a flattened croak.
—It doesn’t matter, he says. Xenie’s dead.
He takes a few stuttering hops and hurls the brick at the door, propelling it with all his energy, a week’s worth of despair compressed in a single throw. The glass shatters with a high-pitched cascading crash.
* * *
Shaun stares into the gaping hole. An emptiness defined by its jagged edges.
* * *
They wait for approaching police sirens or an alarmed neighbor to appear with a shotgun, but nobody seems to care. There’s no response from inside. In a frenzy, Flo scoops up a brick and hurls it at the door, shattering another portion of the glass. Edie lobs a brick with both hands and widens the hole with a piercing smash. Shaun’s next volley obliterates the rest of the pane. They’re granted a fugitive glimpse of the foyer and its long hallway, then the light is extinguished.
* * *
Shaun signals the others to follow him. They step over the threshold of the wooden frame, through the border of broken glass, and into the house. They’re greeted by splintered shards that glimmer across the floor. They walk through the foyer, each clutching a brick. Their steps slow and measured. Their eyes wide and wild. Their ears scanning for any sound that isn’t their own shallow breath. Their noses are attuned to every stray scent. The musk of stale sweat. The fumes of fresh paint. The faint tang of piss.
* * *
Something keeps them from calling out to the boy. As they progress down the darkened hallway, they hear rustling noises deeper in the house. He must be close, Shaun whispers. They enter the living room, which is empty except for a stack of metal folding chairs in the corner. The parquet floor is stripped and scarred, gashed with haphazard grooves. In the corner is a balled-up and blood-soaked athletic sock. Scrawled chalk marks cover one wall, an ongoing tally, arranged like a scoreboard. Somebody has spray-painted a large black circle on another wall. Above it, in stylized block letters, is the phrase KILL CITY.
—What’s Kill City? Edie whispers.
—Haven’t you heard? Flo says. It’s gone viral.
—We are, Shaun says. It’s Arcadia.
* * *
They creep down a hallway that leads to several bedrooms, where the boy must be hiding. The smells become stranger, cloying incense, formaldehyde, burnt hair. They slink into the first room and use their phones to illuminate the space. Plastic folding tables are arranged to resemble workstations. One holds a pile of surgical masks and aerosol paint cans leaking thick black gobs down their sides.
Another table contains cardboard cartons filled with bird eggs. Black and white speckled, green with brown spots, brown and tan, bright blue. Most of the eggs are cracked open and hollowed out.
The final table is covered with rows of small mason jars containing a clear viscous fluid. Shaun picks one up to examine it. He’s pretty sure it’s filled to the brim with gobs of spit.
* * *
The next room is stacked with molting mattresses bearing a faded pattern of roses. They stand upright along the walls, blocking out the windows. A clothesline is tacked across the center of the space, hung with tattered T-shirts, muddy pairs of jeans, and a moth-eaten flag with holes cut into the stripes and stars to form a poncho. Drooping from the end of the line is an assortment of threadbare training bras. Shaun wonders how many people live here. On the far wall, he spots another painted black circle. As they edge into the room, something crunches underfoot like brittle confetti. The entire floor is carpeted by bits of broken eggshells.
* * *
In the hallway, Flo discovers something attached to the baseboards. Unpeeling strips of silver duct tape, she finds herself holding a revolver. It’s freshly polished and slippery to the touch. She feels dizzy and feverish. She’s about to present the weapon to the others as proof, or protection, or provocation—but she stops herself. Instead, she slides open the cylinder. The chambers contain only a single bullet. Rolling it round her palm, she registers its weight. She places the empty gun on the ground, but feels compelled to keep the bullet, pocketing the powdered metal shell as her private memento.
* * *
The last room is bare. The wooden floor is eerily pristine and recently must have been scoured clean. The emptiness feels like its own ritual. In a shadowy corner, they spot a box of condoms and a topless jar of lubricant, but the focal point of the space is another black circle. Shaun wonders what this primal mark means to these people. Was it something they created or something that created them? This one is significantly larger than the others. It sits dead center on the white wall, perfectly round except for trickling drips at the bottom, spray-painted so many times its blackness shines.
* * *
As Shaun looks closer, the black becomes so deep he starts to see purplish hues. It might be a trick of vision, but the circumference of the circle seems to radiate. It pulses with totemic power.
* * *
The longer he stares, the larger the circle grows, swelling like a portal, preparing to swallow him.
Is this what happens when you die?
They enter the kitchen to find the sliding glass door flung open. They stumble into the backyard, sprint across the grass, and confront an expanse of trees. The boy must’ve fled into the woods that run through this part of town. The area has a reputation for being a haven for unstable homeless, the site of gruesome rapes, a dumping ground for stolen corpses. There’s even an infamous rumor about a black market in human organs. None of them are eager to pursue the boy there. Shaun feels immobilized. For the first time tonight, he registers the encroaching cold and begins to shiver. He lets the brick he’s been brandishing fall to the ground.
* * *
They’ve all been
having nightmares about the killers marching through a forest. Dozens of them armed with a variety of weapons, pushing past clinging vines, ducking under thorny branches, steadily tramping closer until you feel yourself surrounded by their vacant stares. It’s a common dream that’s circulated since the epidemic started, variations spreading across the country, infecting the national subconscious. Shaun can’t help replaying the unsettling scenario in his mind and suspects the others are doing the same.
You had the same nightmare.
You’d thrash around in bed and I’d wake you up.
It took you a while to shake it off.
As Shaun stares into the forest, he’s seized by a vision of fire, a massive conflagration of smoldering bark, blistering leaves, blazing boughs. A consuming blaze that smokes out all the potential killers and sends them fleeing into the open. He pictures scores of them running from the towering flames, pursued by the waves of heat and the deafening roar.
* * *
Edie produces a wallet constructed from purple duct tape. I found this on the kitchen counter, she says. He must’ve dropped it. They gather around and comb through the meager contents: several dollar bills, a crumpled note scribbled with addresses, and a driver’s license. Behind scuffed layers of laminate, the boy’s sullen face stares out at them. Shaun inspects his features more closely, comparing them against the killer’s memorized mug shot. There’s a definite resemblance, but that’s not a scar on his cheek. It’s a birthmark. Then there’s the name. The name isn’t even close. He feels queasy. Shit, he mutters.
* * *
Shaun realizes the boy must have been terrified and desperate to get away from them. He catches a glimpse of himself from the boy’s perspective, the cold brutality of his expression in the midst of the dogged pursuit. But still he feels no remorse.
* * *
They pass the wallet from hand to hand as if it’s a stranger’s soiled underwear, an unwanted intimacy. Flo looks like she’s been kicked in the windpipe. Edie’s mind is churning, but Shaun can’t tell whether she’s relieved or concerned.
—This creepy house is almost exactly how I imagined the killers would live, Flo says. There’s something deeply sick about the place.
—Maybe we shouldn’t have broken that window, Edie says.
Flo removes the boy’s ID. In a fury, she tries to rip it in half but only succeeds in twisting the plastic into a misshapen spiral.
—Maybe we should break some more, she says.
* * *
Shaun says: I really wanted it to be him. After that fucked-up funeral, it would’ve been something. Something I could’ve done for her.
He says: Her aunt has this theory that Xenie’s soul can’t move on. She has to have a proper send-off or she’ll be trapped here.
He says: I can’t stop thinking about that.
The others wait for him to continue, but his words have exhausted themselves. He looks up at the sky. The clouds obscure all but a scatter of stars whose pale light is probably posthumous.
* * *
—So let’s do something for her, Edie says.
She polishes the lens of her oversize glasses with the hem of her cardigan while racking her brain for the proper tribute.
—A special concert, she says. For Xenie and the rest of the band. We could do it at a local club and get the entire scene involved.
Shaun shakes his head.
—It’s too much, he says. Too complicated. Anyway, it would ultimately be for everyone else.
He sighs and walks back toward the road. Half the light poles seem busted, and the street’s shadows have taken on more substance than the surrounding houses.
* * *
Somewhere in the night, people have gathered in front of the theater to add candles, stuffed animals, and bouquets of roses to the sprawling shrine for Xenie and the other casualties. Shaun wonders how long before he becomes like one of those strangers, offering their store-bought mementos, performing an empty gesture with solemn reverence.
* * *
Shaun heads back in the direction of downtown, though he doesn’t exactly remember the way. Mostly, he follows the downward slope of the road. There’s no sign of fire, but he smells smoke. The air is perfumed with the sweet smell of char. The scent is oddly intoxicating.
Edie and Flo walk a few steps behind, accompanying him while allowing some space, letting his mood settle. Flo shudders from the deepening chill and Edie wraps her jacket around Flo’s bare shoulders.
—Those eggs freaked me out, Edie says.
—I bet he eats them, Flo says. Cheap meal. Super organic.
Edie laughs a bit, but Shaun doesn’t break a smile.
I’ve changed so much in the few days since you died.
I’ve become so serious, you wouldn’t recognize me now.
Navigating the backstreets of Arcadia, they keep encountering the forest, as if it’s traveling alongside them. Shaun isn’t sure whether they’re retracing their steps or walking in circles. He can’t seem to escape the spooky sound of the wind whisking through the trees. The whispering leaves call to him, trying to lure him closer.
* * *
He pictures the boy huddled there behind a pile of broken branches, cowering in the darkness, not sure if it’s safe to return home.
* * *
At the next corner, Shaun turns toward the faint rumble of the highway overpass. As they cross some railroad tracks, Flo pauses to press her palm against the steel. She lingers for several moments, as if sensing some far-off vibrations relayed through the line. They continue on past a run-down condo complex that looks foreclosed, though a three-tiered fountain still burbles in the concrete courtyard. The rails were cold, Flo says. Nothing’s come through here for a while.
* * *
—When we were kids, we played chicken with the freight trains, Flo says. We’d press our ears to the rails and listen for locomotives. We stood on the tracks to see who could hold their ground longer.
—Xenie liked to challenge the conductor, she says, to see if she could make him use his emergency brake. She loved the high-pitched scream it made and she wouldn’t step away until the last second. Sometimes I worried she secretly wanted to get hit.
—She always won, she says. I could never come close to matching her. I still feel bad about that.
* * *
Night creates confession. They feel no need to comment. The longer they walk, the more attuned they become to one another’s sounds, until even their breathing is in synch.
* * *
Edie speaks in a soft and halting voice as if she’s talking to herself.
She says: A few years ago, I ran away from home. My parents never liked music, never liked me being involved with bands, among other things. They used to … Let’s just say they’re terrible people.
—I didn’t know where else to go, so I went to the diner, she says. I spent the evening there drinking coffee and eating pie. Xenie was working a long shift, and that’s when I met her. She talked me out of going back home to my parents. She insisted at least I stay away for the night. Teach them a lesson. Take a stand. She let me come home with her and crash on her couch.
—I moved out of my parents’ place for good a few weeks later, she says. It was all because of her. I owe her. I owe her everything.
* * *
The street feels like an index of their emotions. The carcass of the dead sparrow in the road, feathers blackened, tiny body imprinted with tire tread. The shards of glass on the sidewalk, illuminated by a stuttering streetlamp, mapping a shattered archipelago. The graffiti tagged on the mailbox that commands: BREAK UP YOUR BAND.
* * *
Flo’s and Edie’s expressions remain concealed by the shadows after they finish their stories, but something torn in their voices broadcasts how they’ve been branded by the experiences. Shaun has a lot of friends, but these are the only people whose wounds go as deep. Xenie was irreplaceable for each of them.
All our memories of you put to
gether, it still isn’t enough.
They’re stopped by a sound floating down the street. Beseeching voices carried by the breeze. As they approach, they realize this must be people singing, several drunken soloists, overlapping snatches of a single chanted melody. They instinctively feel drawn to the sound and quicken their pace up the incline of the hill. The sound grows louder until they realize the voices aren’t singing, they’re sobbing.
* * *
As they crest the hill, they spot a trio weaving up the sidewalk toward them. Two young men support an older woman in a black head scarf and red dress who’s bereft, staggering every few steps, face spattered with tears. She wails between gasping breaths and waves her arms while the men take turns consoling her in low tones. As they pass, Shaun tries to catch their eyes to show he understands their grief, but they don’t look up, consumed by their own tragedy.
* * *
Unsure what else to do, they continue walking toward the site the trio was fleeing. They pass a medical-supply warehouse whose flags tout an assortment of wheelchairs and a sheet-metal storage facility with a mural of a herd of deer, their upper halves nothing more than outlines, as if they’ve been absorbed by the bricks. Several cinder-block buildings are enclosed behind a barbed-wire fence. A pair of silver high heels dangles from a sagging telephone wire. Soon they arrive at a discount supermarket that’s shut for the night. The empty parking lot is lit by sodium lamps, irradiated by a harsh glow that scrubs away every silhouette. In the far corner, Shaun spots yellow ribbons of tape undulating in the wind, cordoning off a crime scene.
* * *
Inside the triangle of police tape rests a chalk outline. It’s the contorted-but-unmistakable form of a human body. Almost certainly the victim of a shooting. The arms and legs are spread wide. The white lines contain dark splotches, like someone has rubbed red into the asphalt. Shaun tries not to stare at the bits of hair and congealed clumps. There’s less to a dead body than he imagined. It’s as if it vanished through the ground, and the chalk marks the edges of a trapdoor.